All posts tagged zombie

I admit I’m biased. Andreas Schnaas is my favourite amateur/no budget director, and I praise nearly everything he releases. Always did, probably always will. He is what Peter Jackson could have been, hadn’t he sold out to Hollywood. I adore especially the Violent Shit trilogy, and the (original) European title gives it away: This is the third and last part of it.

Its the first that actually had some sort of budget beyond a few 1000 bucks and that you can see. Of course, its still a low budget splatter and barely has a story, but there’s the point. No money, no expert effects, no real story, but it has the essential thing that makes a bad movie a great one: Violent Shit has heart.

Karl The Butcher jr., originally based on a German serial killer’s son in Violent Shit 1 and 2, is now the barbarian chief of a brutal militia, inhabiting a lonely island. It should be mentioned that I’m personally a big fan of Andreas Schnaas as an actor, too. No big surprise I give thumbs up for him as Karl Jr. in a ridicolous (but well made) viking costume with a ridicolous (and less well made) metal mask. We see a lot ridicolous metal masks and costumes, and a real tremendous improvement of make up effects, especially the half skeleton-zombie face of Karl The Butcher sr. stands out.

Three random guys arrive on this island for a camping trip or something, and immediately get captured by Karl’s Infantry of Doom militia. This group trains for something, and prepares to wipe out rebels that are also somewhere on the island; the real point of their purpose and goal remains a secret. After one of the campers and a group of rebels/traitors get executed for offending the Meister (Karl jr. is called Meister instead of Master, to underline the slight nazi reference later), the 2 others are set free to be prey for a training hunt of the warriors. That’s not uncommon, obviously the militia is unlimited in members – Karl executes some of his men as an example every 10 minutes.

The great thing about this is – we see it. Unlike other movies, that leave out such scenes due to a lack of money/material for effects and make up excuses for the scenes not being there… Violent Shit 3 just makes up excuses to have more senseless gore scenes; and the special effects are creative and well done. I love how Schnaas’ movies never miss the humor, in this case a very visual “pain in the ass” scene involving a fishing hook and a spine bone.

We also meet Dr. Senius, a mad scientist working for Karl jr., who tries to create a Meisterrace of zombies to fight the rebel army, and intentionally resembles Adolf Hitler with the most ridicolous fake mustache you can imagine. Karl is a bit impatient about the army of darkness (quote!) being ready, so the ghoulish Dr. Senius instructs the Infantry warriors to not damage the heads of their prey. Obviously, some disobey and get executed; involving a daring mud wrestling scene with Andreas Schnaas in a viking custome. It certainly doesn’t look sexy in any way, what the term “mud wrestling” may suggest. But I admit, it looks very manly. And you have a hard time to not laugh if you know/understand the original language and can’t help usually finding Schnaas’ dialect much too cute for something like this. It adds an extra level of absurdity to the scene, and the english synchro certainly takes away a bit of the movie’s very own charme.

The two guys on the run meanwhile met an outcast of the militia who disobeyed the meister after seeing his wife sacrificed to a random god. Here comes a big bonus Schnaas always had – Leon is played by one of the badass triad/yakuza looking guys that appear in almost all Reel Gore Productions. They are friends of the team, and do a lot of the stunts (hence the high ratio of masked people in general). In other words, for amateur movies, the fight scenes stand out. These guys are real martial arts experts and not just dressed like they are. While their fights had totally no relation to anything in Violent Shit 2, they finally get well deserved bigger (unmasked) roles here.

Leon soon gets seperated from the 2 campers, but runs into 2 rebels (also played by badass triad guys). The campers die elsewhere (in explicit gore scenes), the 3 asians decide its time to kill Karl, his father and Dr. Senius before they can unleash their zombie army. Their fight scenes in the forest are incredibly entertaining, and spiced up with fun splatter elements in both armed and unarmed combat. After fighting off the first wave of zombies (wherever they came from; Dr. Senius’ experiments were far from finished), they run into the elite of the (viking-militia-metal mask-psycho) infantry – the Black Ninjas. Needless to say we get to enjoy more Hong Kong style fight scenes with explicit mutilation of several rubber bodies.

Disguised as the freshly defeated ninjas, the 3 sneak into the camp and hell breaks lose. I mean, for real. It doesn’t stop at the regular amateur weapons, its the entire arsenal of a war movie. Starting with self made wood spears and a butterfly knife early in the movie, we get it all here. Katana, machine gun, bow and arrow, axe, shotgun, revolver, viking sword, grenate thrower. Yep, that’s right. 3 ninjas blow up viking warriors in army clothes with grenades. Though Leon dies in something you may call “dramatic death scene” (compared to others, at least), the 2 others manage it to kill their targets and win the battle over the entire infantry of doom.

Famous last words: Movies like this are the reason I just love amateur splatter!

Now this is totally what I mean when I say I hope there’ll be a new cineastic fashion along with Zombieland. The flair is in Last of the Living, though there were clearly some zeros less on the budget. This is a true amateur/low budget production, and has all the good things – barely/non-authorized filming in public places (from what I read, most street/city scenes were filmed on the morning of christmas – that’s dedication!), cheap (but certainly not all bad) make up, amateur actors, soundtrack (and outro credit performance) by local band… But even better, the camera and cut was all but n00bish, someone did a real good job there.

The PG18 rating was certainly not forced on the movie, I more think it’s for marketing purposes. Its not overly gory, and a lot splatter close ups were left out. That’s where the real good camera work shows. You don’t expect an exploding body in every scene because of the way the entire movie is filmed. Cuts, scene switches and such are well done, too. I admit I compared a bit to Goremet here, and that set a whole new low standard, so really ANYTHING looks well done in the face of it. But still, Last of the Living is solid work; a b-movie for the sake of missing budget, not missing talent.

The story is quickly told. 6 months ago, the outbreak turned all New Zealand (and the rest of the world, I assume) into zombies, except for a few survivors. Our main characters are the self-proclaimed womanizer Morgan, the geeky Ashleigh and the rock band guitarist Johnny. It’s not spoken out, but from flashbacks and dialogues it can be assumed that Ash is Morgan’s younger brother, and they met Johnny about 2 months after the outbreak.

Now, that sounds kinda stereotype. It is, and that’s totally cool. All three are losers in their own way. Morgan makes comments that he was working as an actor before everyone became a zombie; sweet and intentional irony that he says he was a great actor and Ash starts laughing at him. From the quality of the acting, I’d say Ash and Johnny are clearly better than the rest of the cast; however, Morgan isn’t as bad as other reviews claim. Ash is the type of geek you’d really expect to survive an outbreak. He’s not too cowardly, but still careful and tries to protect himself with logic. He’s the only of the survivors wearing “gear” when they go zombie bashing, to show less skin the zombies could bite, for example. Johnny, much older than the two brothers, is stereotype rock’n’roll. His solution to everything is chips’n’beer, and he doesn’t mind much to run into a house full of zombies and beat the crap out of them with whatever he finds on the way. My favourite Johnny line has to be when he’s asked if he thinks the zombie issue would be in the way to make his band famous, and he says he’s the only surviving member, but doesn’t really see that as a problem because most bands sold more records after being dead anyways.

These three have no claim to save the world or anything. They break in houses, take what they need from shops, play video games and that’s about it. When they decide the current house is too boring, they drive around to find a better one and come to a church that is surrounded by zombies. They correctly assume there are survivors hiding in the church and go to help them (mainly because Morgan hopes there’s a hot chick). They find a scientist and his daughter Steph, both were working on a cure for the zombies. The father gets bitten, Steph makes it to escape with the trio, but loses the blood sample needed for the cure. To get a new one, they have to go to the hospital where she used to work, extract a new one and put it in some machine. Obviously, the hospital is full of zombies.

In a world that was overran by living dead 6 months ago, its also no big surprise the power goes out while the machine is running. Morgan and Ash fight their way to the basement where they can activate an emergency generator, while Johnny stays in the lab with Steph and defends the blood sample. Morgan and Ash are trapped in the basement; here we get some character scenes that lead to my guess they are brothers; before they can escape through a tunnel or tube or something. Elsewhere, Johnny and Steph escape from the lab, with the blood sample, and they face 30 zombies surrounding their car. While Morgan comes up with a silly plan to just make a run for the car, Johnny offers to distract them since he got bitten and will turn into a zombie within an hour himself. For an amateur script, that’s a real great and touching sacrifice scene and I didn’t even think about Hard Rock Zombies when Johnny gives Steph a tape with his latest songs and asks her to take it to the right people when all this is over. A beautiful detail is that he goes down fighting, and its the first time his self-invented boxing move works (at least for a while).

The 3 survivors continue their way to an airport to bring the blood sample to an island where other scientists work on the cure. Stupid problem – Steph, the only one who can fly a plane, gets bitten. The flight will only take 40 minutes, and she has an hour before she turns into a zombie, so we are a bit in a hurry now. On the airport, Morgan almost sacrifices himself to let Steph and Ash escape, but finally makes it to jump in the plane last minute. And now, as you probably already expected, Steph becomes a zombie during the flight and Ash has to use his knowledge from video games to land the plane on the island. Here, they find the science camp deserted, and in a quite surprising scene, Morgan falls victim to a sudden zombie attack.

Ash finds a not properly working radio in one of the zombie infested buildings, saying to stay away from the island because there are no survivors. Hunted by his now-zombie brother, he runs to the beach and tries to leave the island with a boat. In the process, he kills Morgan and also loses the blood sample in the water. I’m not sure this is really the best way to end the movie, but Ash becomes the last of the living, escaping on a lonely boat. There would have been more original ways to get there, but I’m not really complaining. The movie makes too much hope for the new zombie movie fashion to really happen, and its way better than most other amateur movies I’ve seen since 1995 or so.

A masterpiece of trash from Norway. The topic of this movie is nazi zombie fun splatter. 8 college students (of medicine) wanna spend a weekend in an old hut out in nowhere. Nothing but hills and snow around – and some weirdo Reinhold Messner type of person who lives in a tent and warns the kids that this place has a history. After a raid during WW2, the villagers fought back and the surviving nazis had to flee to the mountains with all gold they could carry. People thought they froze to death, others claim they still roam the mountains. Actually, both is true. An army of nazi zombies wakes up when the campers discover the hidden gold in their hut.

Its bloody – I mean, really bloody. Its funny. It has great effects, especially the makeup of the zombie leader is awesome. Highly recommended!